DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME: A marijuana bud in a medical marijuana ﻿greenhouse gets a close-up in The Botany of Desire, premiering Wednesday on PBS.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME: A marijuana bud in a medical marijuana ﻿greenhouse gets a close-up in The Botany of Desire, premiering Wednesday on PBS.

Photo: Kikim Media

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PARROT TULIP: This exotic flower bears little resemblance to its ancestors from the wilds of Turkey.

PARROT TULIP: This exotic flower bears little resemblance to its ancestors from the wilds of Turkey.

Photo: Ruth Dundas

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Michael Pollan is the author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food: An Eater's Manifesto and other books.

Michael Pollan is the author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food: An Eater's Manifesto and other books.

Photo: Ken Light

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Tracing the evolution of marijuana cultivation

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A live cannabis bud, extremely close up, looks like an exotic salad a four-star chef might dream up — a tangled concoction of orange filaments and white froth on a convoluted crown of green matter. What gardener wouldn't be smitten?

I haven't had the pleasure, legal or otherwise, of seeing one in person. But watching Michael Schwarz's PBS special The Botany of Desire almost made me want to try growing it.

Based on Michael Pollan's best-selling 2001 book, the film premieres Wednesday — finally. It was nine years in the making, Pollan said, largely because the chapter on cannabis — marijuana — concerned the documentary's financial backers.

A decade ago there was no room for a discussion of marijuana that didn't dwell on law-enforcement issues and the moral implications of partaking, Pollan said. “I take it as a sign that the drug war is fading that this film got made, with money from public television and the National Science Foundation.”

The Botany of Desire($16, Random House, 304 pp.) examines how four familiar plant species, by gratifying basic human yearnings, have more or less hoodwinked us into helping them evolve.

Tulips might still be gangly little flowers growing on the steppes of Central Asia if sultans and Dutchmen hadn't wanted them in gardens centuries ago.

Had apples not been sweet, they might never have traveled from the forests of Kazakhstan to Europe and then America, where enterprising nurserymen like Johnny Appleseed spread them to provide pioneers with hard-cider crops. Potatoes can yield an abundance of food per acre — thus satisfying our urge to control nature.

And cannabis, lowly weed that it is, fulfills our urge (I use this in a general sense) to be intoxicated.

But in the late 20th century, the film suggests, drug enforcement drove illicit marijuana producers so far underground that they developed greenhouses with hyper-growth power to survive. In the process, they created plants more potent than the ones found in the wild.

“That was a real epiphany to me,” Pollan said, “when I realized high-tech marijuana growers were the best gardeners of my generation.”

Though the film doesn't quite capture the book's philosophical musings, it's faithful to the book's spirit. At two hours long, it's almost information overload — perhaps best TiVo'd or viewed on DVD so it can be consumed by its well-delineated chapters.

Schwarz — who's known Pollan since their days as young journalists — also lets other authors chime in. And he's expanded and updated the research — taking in the scenes at Holland's massive Aalsmeer flower market, potato fields in Peru and laboratories where scientists are studying learning and memory in rats.

“He added to the story in important ways,” Pollan said.

The author, who used to call himself “a nature writer who focused on the garden,” has evolved over the years, too. Within The Botany of Desire are the kernels for his more recent, better-selling best-sellers, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.

His next book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, comes out in January. It's a brief look at nutritional wisdom across cultures, he said. A longer book about cooking as a transformative act is brewing — influenced, as was The Botany of Desire, by his home gardening experiences.

His next book, Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, comes out in January. It's a brief look at nutritional wisdom across cultures, he said. A longer book about cooking as a transformative act is brewing — influenced, as was The Botany of Desire, by his home gardening experiences.

The documentary offers a glimpse of Pollan in this earthy mode, planting potatoes at home in Berkeley, Calif., where he's taught and lived the past six years. He owned a large garden in Connecticut when he wrote his first two books, A Place of My Own and Second Nature. Now his inspiration springs from three raised beds that — like many a small, urban garden — provide frustrations in spite of being packed with vegetables all summer.

“I'm getting used to gardening on a different scale,” he said.

Berkeley has a year-round gardening climate, but Pollan's place is shaded by a behemoth home next door. “In October, things just stop growing,” he said. “I can continue to pick greens. We have a lot of kale. But it won't grow back very much. It's too bad. If I just had a little more sunlight. …”